Any good books for a beginner on the following openings?
- Sicilian
- Grunfeld
- King's indian
- French

For sicilian something with as many variations as possible so I can learn and understand the concepts behind the white lines as well.

There's no reason for a beginner to be studying openings out of books...or even at all. Tactics and basic strategy are what you need to concern yourself with. You're literally wasting your time spending more than 10% of your study on openings at this point.

Check out Yasser Seirawan's series of books. Here's the one on overall strategy, for example: http://www.uscfsales.com/winning-chess-strategies.html. These should provide a nice launching off point for you and then you can move onto books like My System and Chess Praxis...or the Silman line of material as many would suggest although Silman's work is basically at the same level as that series of Seirawan books. Seirawan actually taught Silman.

Well, you are right yes but I started from scratch with Capablanca's 'Chess Fundamentals' followed by 'My System' and 'Fundamental Chess endings' Muller/Lamprecht and have 3 more chess ebooks on general chess principles waiting after that and I have a hard copy of Fischer's 60 memorable games too so I figured I should get something on openings that I like to learn and play.

Nothing wrong with that imo and I already have 2 books on King's Indian and there's a ton of videos on YouTube explaining the strategy behind first few moves on all openings so I think I'm good on learning material until end of this year anyway.

Thanks for at least answering the post though.

If you're truly a beginner, you're spending WAY too much time reading books and not enough time playing. Simply studying tactics and playing long games against better opponents is, by far, the fastest route to progress. At a beginner level, you can read all the books you want but due to your inexperience, will fail to appropriately apply the concepts in them.

Play more. Preferably games that are 35/5 and longer. Review them afterwards and work on tactics. That's the fast track to 1400+.

As far as books, collections of annotated games are helpful. The Kasparov "My Great Predecessors" series is very good.

Opening books are not really that useful at all. All the openings you mentioned are crazy complicated - there are dozens of books written on individual subvariations of each of them.

Just look up the openings you are interested in on chess databases like 365chess.com to see what strong players play. Try out some of the ideas you notice in your own games. And use the computer to go over your games and see where you went wrong. Figure out which positions you have a good feel for and which positions you struggle with and then think about which openings you can play to angle for positions you like.

Yeah, I echo what others said about playing and analyzing your games being the way forward.

+1 to the posters above. For openings books, the "starting out" series by everyman chess is what you are looking for. I guess they could be a decent training aid if you do not waste time on memorizing lines, but instead go through the example games and annotations with an overall chess learning outlook.